Similarly, The Paris Review was founded by CIA agent (and novelist and National Book Award winner) Peter Matthiessen[1] as a form of "cultural propaganda"[2].
Can anyone hazard a guess as to how Linus was able to measure the cost of a page fault and an iret so precisely? What tools and techniques might he have used?
The author references the work of Barbara Frederickson, a psychologist who had a very popular theory on "Positivity Ratios", a theory that was in part justified by misuse of differential equations from fluid dynamics, and was thoroughly debunked in "The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking: The Critical Positivity Ratio" [1].
There have been several good summaries of this paper and the work that led up to it over the past few months (my favorite being this [2] one).
I'd take this author's view with a grain of salt (or something stronger).
It seems very weird to put the word "experiences" in quotes. It makes it seem as if the writer is using it sarcastically, or is in some way disclaiming what they are writing. What in the world justifies the quotes, and why wouldn't an editor get rid of them?
Is it also the case that all transcendental numbers have approximations of unbounded quality? Or only that Liouville numbers have approximations of unbounded quality, and therefore cannot be algebraic?
FYI, I was about to join up, but I declined because it wanted my contacts.
For the most part, contracts are signed by relatively new contacts (people not yet in my address book). E.g. new customers, partners, contractors, or employees.
I hope you'll get rid of this unnecessary intrusion into my privacy in the future. And, for what its worth, people who send around lots of NDAs, LIOs, term sheets, employee agreements and other sorts of contracts usually value their privacy.
And yes -- I understand that you say you won't be spamming my contacts or mining it for data. It's just that I don't know you.
I can't agree more. When I was a freshman, I was required to do a work study as part of the deal for my loans. I didn't want to do it -- my course load seemed hard enough -- but I found a job as an "undergraduate research programmer" at a small computer-vision oriented lab at my school. I worked around 10 hours a week during the school year, and 40 during the summers. Particularly during my freshman and sophomore years, I felt completely useless. But, even without noticing it, you pick up a LOT just by struggling with it (e.g. gdb, complex build systems, working with legacy code, version control systems, common patterns of software development, and how to get into a flow state even while hacking on bits of software that aren't all that interesting to you personally). By the summer between my sophomore and junior year, I was finally starting to feel a bit productive.
In any other environment, I would have never had the opportunity to be a completely worthless drain on resources for so long.
So certainly avail yourself of any opportunity to get a job while in school. I was lucky in that I was essentially forced to do it based on the terms of my loans. Any parents reading this: see if you can do your kids a favor and secure them a loan that requires your kids to get a work study, coop, or internship. And no, working as barista at the campus cafe doesn't count!
I'd think that a huge benefit "gamification" is that it allows students to learn at their own pace and without much teacher guidance. Kids figure out how to play Portal and Civilization, for instance, without a teacher hovering over them to tailor their lessons.
Is this the first step in YC pivoting away being a "seed investor", where the goal is to pick winners? Does PG see the future of YC as being an alternative to post-graduate education where the goal is instead to develop winners and have a stake in their success?
If this model works out, I wonder if we'll eventually see traditional universities funding startups for top students out of their endowments.
That story was posted on April 1st in 2009, and isn't hosted on BBC's website. There isn't even a first name given for the researcher (only "Radio astronomer Dr. Venn"). Looks sketchy to me.
I can't find any other information about it, so I'm guessing its a hoax / April Fools joke.
One of the most thought provoking books I've ever read is "A Terrible Love of War" by James Hillman. This books explores the topic of the linked article from a Jungian point of view (motifs, archetypes, metaphors, mythology, etc...) which may turn off some people, but I found it expansive and fascinating. Highly recommended if the topic of the Esquire article was interesting to you.
I know there are lots of anti-patent folks on HN, but if anything deserves patent protection, digital fountains certainly do. This is useful, novel, and certainly non-obvious stuff. And really quite beautiful, IMHO.
Its always bothered me to read about inventors who discovered beautiful and amazing things, only to die penniless while powerful interests reaped all of the financial benefits. Hopefully the people who discovered these codes have been richly rewarded for their work.
This video made me curious about what a magnet factory would look like and I found a really great video that goes step by step through the process at a neodymium magnet manufacturer in Shanghai:
I was sort of hoping that the factory would look like that plexiglass prison in the X-Men movie that was designed to prevent Magneto from using his powers.
Alas, it's nothing like that, but it's an interesting video nonetheless.
> Particularly if those financial services are extractive in nature?
Could you elaborate on that sentence? What do you mean by "extractive"? In the context of natural resources, I take that word to imply that the resource is depleted (e.g. non-renewable). Do you have a difference sense in mind?
With regard to your suggestion that Apple is the offensive party in patent disputes, it's important to remember that the roles of offense and defense are reversed when you enter a court. This is because of the presumption of innocence.
When a murderer enters a courtroom, he's the defendant because he is presumed innocent. If the jury returns a guilty verdict, he becomes an offender, and the roles switch back. Following the verdict, it would be justified to view the prosecution as having defended society against the murderer who committed the offense. Prior to the verdict, the jury agrees to see things the other way around.
Likewise, Apple brings suit because, in its view, its patents should defend their innovations against copying. Again, because of the presumption of innocence, Samsung (or whoever) plays the role of defendant until a verdict is returned. Should Apple win their suit, then (under law) Samsung will be viewed as the offender, and Apple will have successfully defended itself against unlawful copying.
Which is a long way of saying that, if you believe that Samsung has unlawfully copied Apple's innovations, then it's entirely correct to view Apple as the defensive party in this patent mess.
“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” -- Steve Jobs
I desperately wish I was capable of seeing deeply into the meaning of that statement. I appreciate design, design thinking, human factors, etc..., but not nearly enough to understand it as the "fundamental soul," or how it (what?) expresses (how?) itself (who?).
If anyone here can provide a few words, or a pointer to some great communicator of design, I would very much appreciate it.
If you google several of the names from the article, you'll find that many of those engineers are still working on NeXT R&D, although under different product names (OS X and iOS). I wonder if any of them ever imagined that average janes and joes would be running NeXT workstations on their cell phones?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUafzOXHPE